The Bones of You

by Gary McMahon

  “Hi,” she said, sitting down at the table. She moved slowly, with elaborate care. I could tell that she was drunk. Maybe even stoned. With her, it was sometimes hard to tell the difference.

  “Did you drive?”

  She shook her head, not even taking the bait and arguing. “He’s in the car. He brought us here.”

  I stared at her.

  “He’s sober…for now.”

  I held on to Jess even tighter, feeling her little body through her clothes. At least she seemed well-fed. Holly might be many things, but she was not a neglectful mother. Despite her alcohol problems, and the fact that her boyfriend was an unrepentant junkie, she always made sure that Jess ate properly, got dressed in the morning, and made it to school with a healthy packed lunch. Sometimes I wished it were different; I prayed that she would slip up and start to be less attentive toward our daughter, forgetting to make sure she was okay. That way I might be able to take over, to be the main parent.

  Then, when I saw how much my girl loved her mother, I felt bad for thinking those things.

  The whole situation was such a fucking mess, and the only people to blame were Holly and me. Our daughter was innocent; she’d done nothing to deserve such shitty parents.

  I sat down. Jess sat in my lap, pleased to see me. She kept talking at me, telling me about her friends at school, the recent trip she’d been on with her class, her favorite teacher…but I kept staring at Holly, shocked by how old she looked. She wasn’t wearing much makeup, so I could see the aging effects the alcohol had on her skin. She wasn’t the same woman I’d once loved; she didn’t even look like her, not anymore.

  “Do you want something? A sandwich? Cup of coffee?”

  Holly shook her head. “I have to get back…to the car. We have plans.”

  I gritted my teeth. I didn’t want to know what those plans were or what kind of self-abuse they might involve. Part of me still loved her, but another, greater part of me just wanted her to stop what she was doing because it meant I could cease caring. Every time I saw her, even if it were just for a little while, it felt like the knife that was still lodged in my gut slipped a little, cutting across my abdomen, causing me another moment of pain.

  “I’ll meet you here on Sunday. Noon.”

  I nodded. “See you then.”

  She stood up to leave.

  “Holly?”

  She turned to me, and I wanted to see something on her face—some expression that said, “Save me, take me away from all this,” but all I saw was a cracked shell, a flimsy barrier against the world that was crumbling even as she stood there. Her armor of alcohol, the needy, dependent boyfriend, and her own rage, were no longer enough to protect her.

  “What?” Her eyes gave nothing away. They could have been drawn on, for all the life they contained.

  “Nothing. I’ll see you on Sunday.”

  She turned around and walked to the door, opened it, then slipped back out of my life, like a creature vanishing between the cracks on a rocky landscape.

  “Come on, baby,” I said to Jess. “Let’s get you home. How would you like to see your new room?”

  “Yay!” she said, her voice so high and fine and filled with all the hope that I could not experience.

  We stood. She took my hand. I led her outside to look for the car, trying to remember where the hell I’d parked it.

  Back in the vast car park, I caught sight of Holly sitting in the passenger’s seat of a battered old Ford Escort whose color had faded to something neutral. The man in the driver’s seat was familiar. Pace had a beard now, but I could still recognize him from the last time we’d met. The black eye had healed, but his nose was still crooked from the break. His eyes still possessed that shifty look I hated so much, the look of the habitual addict: all mute paranoia and cold, relentless hunger. They were talking animatedly. Not an argument exactly, but certainly a heated debate. I wondered if Holly was back on the drugs. I knew she was still attending counselling for her alcoholism, but she seemed to be staying clear of the harder stuff.

  I couldn’t know. It was impossible to tell. Whenever I even thought of this subject, an image invaded my mind. A memory: Holly, lying on her back on our marital bed, locked into a sixty-nine position with a thin, muscular black man. She was sucking his cock and he was snorting a line of coke off her belly. Her old supplier, the man who had got her hooked on drugs.

  God, I hoped she wasn’t returning to her old ways. Everything about her screamed that she was, but the authorities seemed to think she was okay, she was managing her addictions, that she could still be a good mother to our daughter. She was officially classed as a “recovering addict,” but that was a broad definition.

  I tightened my grip on Jess’s hand as we made our way to my car. I don’t think she noticed the tension in my body, and even if she did, she didn’t mention it. She was a good girl, my Jess. A great daughter: the best there was.

  I glanced over my shoulder and saw the grubby Ford Escort pull out of the parking spot and drive slowly toward the exit. Holly turned and caught my eye. She held my gaze, and a small, sad smile lit up her face for the briefest moment before she looked away.

  Betrayal is like a knife in the gut, but the knife is left there once the attack is over. And each time you think about what happened, every time you look at your betrayer, the blade slides sideways, making the cut that little bit wider and deeper, and prolonging the hurt.

  Other memories tried to break through the wall of my mind, these ones much darker and more dangerous than the recollection of finding my wife in bed with her old drug dealer. I pushed them away. They had no business here in my new life. They were part of an old life that I no longer even recognized as my own. Those things had happened to someone else, a man who was still mired in darkness, standing knee-deep in a pool of his own nightmares. I wasn’t that man. I didn’t even know him.

  We got in the car and I started the engine, feeling profoundly alone. Jess was singing a song from the backseat. I didn’t recognize the words, but it had a chirpy tune. Probably some recent chart hit, a forgettable number from the latest boy band on the block. I listened to her sweet, light voice as I drove, letting it fill me, allowing it to reconnect me with the world outside my own head. Her voice sent those twitching bad memories away before they could even form into proper visuals. It burned them like a flash fire; burned them to ashes.

  EIGHT

  It Was Like This

  I remember being in the car with my dad. My mother was still alive. I must have been eight or nine years old.

  I have no idea where my mother was at the time—it was just me and my dad, out for an early evening drive, or maybe going somewhere specific, perhaps to visit someone. I can’t remember. It doesn’t matter. We were in the car, just me and him. That’s what matters here.

  The sky was growing dark outside the car windows. I have a vague notion that it was late in the year but not quite winter. We were alone on the road, one of those freak pockets of traffic-free driving. On either side of the car, the bleak moors stretched for miles. I think we were heading toward Manchester, or we might have been returning from Manchester to Leeds. Again, this isn’t important. Just the darkening sky, the empty road, the moors…they’re important.

  I glanced sideways, at my dad, and saw that he was frowning. He was staring straight ahead, through the windshield, but in the reflected light of the dashboard I could see the worry lines on his face. His forehead was creased. His mouth was a tight slit in his face. He might have been worried, or scared. I think it was probably a little bit of both.

  This was a few months before my parents split up. I didn’t know why they broke up back then, but I do now: my mother was having an affair with a work colleague. It started slowly, with clandestine lunches, a quick drink after work, and then developed into illicit sex in badly decorated hotel rooms during weekend conferences. Then there were no conferences; they were just a lie to facilitate the sex.

  I think my dad knew abo
ut the affair for a long time before he confronted my mother. What held him back—the thing that stopped him from asking her outright—wasn’t his fear of her, it was me, what it would do to me if their marriage broke apart.

  So he kept it in, held it back, probably lay staring at the ceiling instead of sleeping at night, and listening to my mother’s deep breathing next to him, hoping for a way out of the mess.

  That day in the car, surrounded by the shadowed moors, I stared at him and felt a terrible tightness in my chest. I started to cry, but silently. I didn’t want him to know that I knew he was hurting. That was the extent of my insight: I could sense his pain, and it caused me pain, too.

  We sat there for what felt like hours but what was really, in all probability, just the space of a few minutes, him staring out at the road, his face knitted in a fearful frown, and me staring at him, tears flowing down my cheeks.

  Then headlights flared on the road ahead, and my dad blinked. I turned away, lifted a hand and rubbed my face, drying the tears. The headlights grew brighter, came closer. They were on full-beam. My dad started flashing his headlights, trying to signal to the other driver that he needed to dip his lights and slow down. The other driver sounded his horn, but he dipped the lights as he passed us on the other side of the road, heading in the direction from which we’d come.

  “Fuck,” said my dad. It was the only time I ever heard him swear. “That idiot is going to get someone killed.” He turned toward me. His cheeks were wet. I hadn’t noticed before, but he’d been crying, too. He smiled. It was the saddest smile I think I’ve ever seen.

  I didn’t say a word. I just sat there, feeling closer to my dad than ever before, yet also aware that there was an immeasurable distance between us. For some reason, this small incident had opened up a channel, forged a connection across that gap. I didn’t understand it then, and I don’t understand it now. It was just one of those things, those tiny moments where the universe tilts toward you, giving you an insight that makes no sense, but feels good anyway.

  My dad is dead now. He survived my mother, but not by very long. He’s been gone a long time—too many years for me to want to count them. But whenever I think of him—when I remember what kind of man he was—I call up that time, that place, that moment in the car, when we shared something strange and intangible but neither of us possessed the knowledge or the understanding to speak of it.

  NINE

  Magic in the Garden

  The basic idea was for Jess and me to do some gardening. The garden was in serious need of attention, she liked doing things—physical things—and I thought it might prompt some serious father-daughter bonding. It was a basic plan, but at least it was a plan. I found some comfort in that.

  “So, what do you think?” I looked at her and smiled.

  We were standing just outside the side door, facing the knock-kneed timber fence that wrapped around the overgrown area. I was trying to ignore the house next door. Its presence was becoming unsettling. I wished that I hadn’t been told about what had happened there, the things that had been done within its walls. If I could have pretended it was just a normal empty house, it would have been okay. But I couldn’t. I knew too much.

  Jess surveyed the little patch of land at the rear of my house, taking in the high weeds, the out-of-control lawn, and the planting beds that had been choked so badly by weeds that little of the original flowers remained, just a few tired, drooping flower heads and torn petals. She folded her arms across her chest, pouted for a few seconds, and then turned to me.

  “I think,” she said, her face all serious and beautiful, like that of a tiny shop-worn angel, “that we have a lot of work to do before dinner.”

  “Come on, then. Let’s get cracking.”

  I’d already changed into some old clothes—combat trousers, a torn sweater, and a pair of battered walking boots—and Jess was wearing the same clothes she’d arrived in, which would need washing anyway so it didn’t matter how scruffy she got. I went to the old shed at the bottom of the garden, fighting through the long grass, and opened the door. It wasn’t locked; the padlock was hanging by its broken metal ring. Inside, I found some old gardening tools. They weren’t very good; they were old and rusty, and looked like they might break if we used them. But they’d do; they’d serve a purpose. The aim here was just to make some headway, perhaps create a small dent in the jungle. We weren’t out to transform this into something out of Homes and Gardens.

  “How about you start over there,” I said, pointing to a narrow planting bed that was choked with weeds but not so many that they obscured the soil beneath, which actually looked pretty healthy. I handed her a small hand-trowel and fork.

  “Okay, Daddy.” Her quick smile almost broke my heart, and then it was gone as she scampered over to the planting bed, trowel in hand, and fell onto her knees to start work.

  I stood and looked at the rest of the garden. It was a mess. Nobody had touched it in years. A lot of the rougher vegetation—the high weeds and the long yellow ivy that had smothered most of the fence—had grown through from the plot next door. It looked sickly, that ivy; it looked like something pestilent. For a second I imagined it as the physical manifestation of the deeds that had been carried out over there. A creeping, crawling evil.

  I walked over to the fence, using a shovel to batter down the rampant grass. There were holes in the fence, and in some places it had given way completely, so that the only thing holding it up was that damned crawling ivy, or whatever it was. I remembered reading something about some kind of Japanese root that was impossible to get rid of. I was no gardener, but I seemed to recall the article mentioning something about the stuff killing every other plant it touched. I wondered if this vile weed was what I’d read about.

  Something shifted in the grass off to my right. I turned and saw the grass shivering, as if something had ducked away out of sight. Something small and sly and fast: a wild animal, probably. I hoped it wasn’t a rat. That was one problem I really didn’t need.

  “You okay back there?” I turned around and looked at Jess. Her small back was bent over, her arms were moving violently.

  “Yes,” she said, without turning. “This is tricky.”

  I smiled.

  Tricky, I thought. Everything’s tricky, my darling. You’ll find that out by yourself quickly enough.

  I walked away from the fence, returning to the part of the garden where my daughter was working. For some reason, I didn’t want to be too far from her side. It was broad daylight, the sun was even shining, high up in a waxy sky, but I felt afraid for her. So much had happened in her young life, much of it made up of events that she didn’t even know about. All I wanted to do was to protect her, to love her, to make her feel safe. I’d never felt safe in my life, but I was determined that I could do that for Jess. That, if nothing else.

  She needed me, and I certainly needed her. I think I needed her needing me.

  “This is horrible,” she said, lifting a long gray weed into the air and flicking it away. She’d done well, clearing a large patch of the planting bed so that I could inspect the soil. The ground wasn’t as good as I’d first thought. Now that it was exposed, it looked gray, too, as if it were parched.

  I glanced again at the plot next door, the abandoned house. The boards on the windows. The dirty roof tiles. The walls and the flaking paintwork. Had it infected my place? Was that even possible, that bad deeds could spread like disease, leaving a trail of destruction, churning up the earth and planting its seeds to flower into degraded life much later on?

  Bad memories stirred at the back of my mind. I didn’t want to go there, not when I was with Jess. I had no desire to pollute my time with her by remembering events that should remain buried, like the corpses of old house pets under the earth upon which I now stood.

  I knelt down beside her and clasped her hand. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea?”

  She put down the trowel, wiped her small hands on her jeans, and grinned. “I
know a good idea.”

  “Come on, then. Tell me. What’s this good idea of yours?”

  She giggled. The sound almost broke my heart. “Ice cream,” she said, blinking.

  “You know what?” I stood and kicked at the grass. “I think you’re right.” This had been a bad idea. Gardening was stupid. However hard you worked, no matter how much crap you cleared away, it grew back stronger.

  Jess giggled again, and then she glanced quickly to her left, near the place where I’d seen that quick, stealthy movement in the grass. “Oh, Daddy,” she said. She stood and rushed over to the fence, not far from where I’d been standing. “Did you see it?”

  I walked to her side, trying to ignore the irrational fear that I brought along with me. “See what, baby?”

  “The cat.”

  I looked where she was pointing. There was a shape crouched in the long grass. It might have been a cat, yes, or an extremely large rat. I wasn’t taking any chances. Not anymore.

  “Come on, Jess. Let’s get that ice cream. I’m hungry.”

  “But he might be hungry. The cat. I think he wants to make friends.”

  She took a few cautious steps over toward the fence, and the longer grass wrapped around her legs, her knees, her thighs… The grass stirred. There was no breeze. I glanced again at the house next door, wondering what might be hiding in its dark interior. Could badness be stored, like preserves in glass jars? Perhaps if I went in there, I’d find row upon row of containers, each one containing a small sin. The larger sins—the ones committed by the ex-tenant—would be skulking in the corners, hidden from view.